


Cephalophore

by spqr



Series: ladies!! [7]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Female Tony Stark, Multi, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:29:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28299735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Toni always knew that her husband was a spy.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, James "Bucky" Barnes/Tony Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: ladies!! [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1733536
Comments: 22
Kudos: 283





	Cephalophore

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Lustrous](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2156) by [rageprufrock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock). 



> back on my bullshit! this one goes out to all the stuckonies who still follow me <3 merry christmas, happy holidays, etc
> 
> (if you like SGA, or just like very very good writing, check out Lustrous by rageprufrock, whose concept i shamelessly stole like a thief in the night)

Toni’s earliest memory is of the magnetic alphabet Anna Jarvis brought home from the supermarket, the blocky, colorful letters that stuck to the fridge in the attached servant’s quarters.

She remembers taking out all the numbers—just ten of them, 0 through 9, plus a handful of basic math symbols that she didn’t understand yet—and dumping the letters in the trash. Anna told her later that she’d been intending to teach Toni to spell her name, since at age three Toni had already had the vocabulary of a very precocious and foul-mouthed teenager, but once she saw how interested Toni was in the numbers she decided to start with counting instead. Toni mastered it in the space of five minutes and demanded to know what the symbols were. Anna, charmed if a bit flustered, pulled Toni into her lap and explained what would become the fundamentals of Toni’s entire world: _One plus two equals three. Three minus one equals two. Two divided by two—you see, if I have two hair pins in my hand, and I split them up into two groups, I only have one in each hand?_

By the end of the week Anna was forced to go out and buy a more extensive ‘Elementary Arithmetic!’ magnet set so that she could help Toni puzzle her way through fractions and long division. Anna was 70; high school math had been a long time ago for her, but there was never any question of going up into the mansion proper and asking Toni’s father to help out. Toni doesn’t remember a hell of a lot about being three, but she does remember that, however little time her dad had for her once she was a grown up, peer-reviewed mathematician, he had even less when she was a useless toddler who couldn’t even hold a pencil without wrapping her whole fist around it.

(It was Jarvis himself, she remembers, who handled that, sitting on the floor next to her teeny tiny child’s desk with his knees pulled up, talking to her in that gentle British accent and adjusting her fingers until she could scratch out in shaky upper case letters _A-N-T-O-N-I-A N-A-T-A-S-H-A S-T-A-R-K_. When she finally made it to kindergarten she was still drawing her esses backwards but she could FOIL binomials, work a trig calculator, and recite Pi to the 90th digit.)

According to Toni’s internal mythology, which is about as unreliable as they come, the first time Howard ever looked at her like she was something more than a mild inconvenience he wanted to disappear was when the principal at Toni’s hippy-dippy $50,000/year kindergarten sent home a letter suggesting that Toni get a private math tutor, since it wasn’t really feasible to send her to the high school once a day for Calc AB. Jarvis had been the first to read the letter, and after a muttered conversation with his wife had elected to bring the issue before Maria, who had smiled a bit absently, three sheets to the wind already at noon, taken Toni’s hand, and brought her and the letter up to Howard’s study.

“Howard, dear,” she said, floating through scattered machine parts and crumpled pieces of paper to her husband. “Look at this. She takes after you.”

“Who takes after me?” Howard muttered, too busy to look up even as Maria stroked the back of his hair, his sweaty neck, the shell of his ear.

“Your _daughter_ ,” Maria said, and he snorted.

But he read the letter, and then gave Maria a lecture about how girls were naturally less adept at pursuits that required a high degree of spatial awareness, after which he picked Toni up and sat her on his work bench and made her work out geometric proofs without a calculator until some of his bravado slipped away and a wrinkle cropped up between his eyebrows. He tore the paper out from under her pencil, scribbled something on a notepad, and handed her back a problem that required her to find the limit of several functions.

Jarvis and Anna, who were very insistent about Toni having as many normal childhood experiences someone of her parentage possibly could, had refused to give her a calculus textbook until she was at least six, but the library in her school had a few computers and even though kindergarteners won’t allowed to use them, most of the big kids never changed their password from ‘passw0rd,’ so it only took Toni a minute to solve the problem.

When she was done, Howard only said one word.

_Slow._

***

“Slow,” Pepper reminds Toni, for what must be the millionth time. “Slow, slow, slow. Talk _slow_.”

Toni, who’s had three cups of coffee in the last hour and had to take a quick run around the block just to cool off, says, “I’ve got it, Pep. It’s in the bag. Slow. Slowslowslow. Don’t worry.”

“Oh Jesus,” says Pepper, and even 5,000 miles away over the phone, she somehow manages to sound beleaguered, defeated, and in premature mourning for their research budget. “How much caffeine have you had?”

“Barely any,” Toni lies. “Seriously, you need to calm down. It’s gonna be fine. When has it never not been fine?” Then, before her longsuffering, pessimistic grad student can answer, “Never mind. Don’t answer that.”

“Oh Jesus,” Pepper says again, with feeling.

Toni’s about to comfort her some more—really, she is—but then the nice woman from the Royal Society is tapping her watch and making the universal ‘hang up the phone, idiot,’ face, so Toni says, “Gotta go, Pep, call you when it’s over,” and hangs up the phone, idiot.

It’s not that the Royal Society is a particularly tough crowd—as far as Toni can figure, they don’t admit any members under the age of a thousand years old—but an invitation for a non-member to lecture is a very rare thing, and there are always lots of independent potential benefactors lurking in the wings, looking to put their name on the next ‘breakthrough of the century.’ Caltech’s got an endowment that would make the Pope jealous, but most of the research money goes to the shinier departments—astrophysics, microbiology, biomedical engineering. Quantum field theory and infinite-dimensional algebra just isn’t as sexy, or as easy to explain to the readers of _Popular Science_. The professors in pure math have to dance for their dinners, which is why Toni’s here, a continent and an ocean away from her own bed, jittering in the wings of Britain’s most exclusive smarty-pants club and getting ready to dance.

(That’s the only reason she’s nervous. It’s nothing to do with the fact that the last—and only other—time she gave a lecture here, twenty and freshly-orphaned, still subject to words like ‘prodigy’ and ‘ingenue’ and ‘audacious,’ she’d ended up going to dinner with a big blond guy from the audience and then two years later ended up married.)

“Without further ado,” the British man on stage is saying into the microphone, “I give you our guest of honor, Fields Medalist and winner of the Millennium Prize for her proof of the Poincaré conjecture, Dr. Antonia Rogers.”

Toni realizes at the last second that there are probably cameras out there, and that they’re probably going to take pictures of her with her wedding ring still on. On the off chance that Steve sees them, she doesn’t want him to think she’s pining or re-thinking the divorce or anything, but it’s too late to do anything about it, so she puts on her Howard Stark smile—big, shiny, worth a million bucks—and walks out on stage.

***

Four hours later, after a brutally slow Q&A in which Toni was asked A) how old she was, B) where she’d gone to school, and C) whether she knew, in fact, that the Riemann hypothesis had never been proven, she storms out the back door to avoid the press, who still follow her like she’s fucking Britney even ten years after her parents’ death, and installs herself in the nearest pub. It’s called _The Black_ Something— _Boot? Shoe? Lagoon?_ —and the only people inside are the sort of grumpy old men who spend their days shuffing from the pub to the corner store and back to the pub just to avoid the missus nagging at home—in other words, people who have no idea who Toni is and don’t care to learn.

She’s two pints deep and starting to think about ordering something stronger even though it’s barely past noon when a man slides onto the stool next to her and says, “You’re Stark, right?”

Toni turns to look at him, looks away, and then turns to look again. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Bucky Barnes—Bucky _fucking_ Barnes, whose funeral she went to, whose folded American flag sat framed on her mantelpiece for nine goddamn years, who her husband used to wake up screaming for—has the audacity to ask, “What?”

“Unbelievable,” Toni says. “Un-fucking-believable.” Then she leaves a twenty pound note on the counter and gets the hell out.

Bucky’s still following her ten minutes later, as she jogs across the street into Kensington Gardens, and she can tell from the way he’s doing it that he thinks he’s being sneaky about tailing her, so she figures if they’re going to have it out they might as well do it in a public place so the paparazzi can recoup the cost of their airfare.

Only, the second she turns around and makes eye contact, he pulls her off the path into a grove of trees. “Don’t yell, okay?” he implores, sort of whiney. “I’m tired.”

“Get your hands off me,” she snaps, shoving him back.

Bucky looks wounded, but he holds his hands up in surrender. “Okay. Okay. I’m not touching you, Tones, I promise.”

Toni’s thrown by the nickname—she hasn’t seen him since he gave the best man speech at her wedding reception, but he’s standing here calling her something Steve used to call her in bed. It makes her volcanically mad, and she’s about to open her mouth and yell at him, but before she can he asks, “What did I do?”

That makes her even more mad. “What did you _do?”_ she repeats, incredulous. “What do you think, asshole? You died. You died and you made him grieve for you and now you’re standing in front of me, alive.”

Bucky says nothing for a long moment, staring through the dappled leaves at the garden path, and after a while Toni realizes that his eyes are red-ringed, that he’s swallowing convulsively, like he’s trying not to cry. And when he finally speaks, when he croaks out, “Maybe I should’ve started by explaining,” his voice is rough and thick.

“Don’t bother,” Toni snaps, and starts to shove past him, with a shoulder check for good measure.

Except he grabs her arm again and holds her there, even as she tries to shake him off. “Listen,” he says, and gives her a good jolt to get her to stop playing around. “Listen, Toni, please. Come on.”

“Fuck _off_.” She shoves him again, but he doesn’t let go.

She’s about ready to open her mouth and yell for help from the family of Chinese tourists giving them curious looks from over by the hydrangeas, except—

“I’m not him,” Bucky blurts. “I’m not your Bucky.”

Toni stops struggling. “What?”

Bucky’s face twists up like an awkward twelve-year-old trying to ask his crush to the middle school mixer. “I’m not from around here,” he clarifies. “Dimensionally speaking.”

“Huh,” Toni says. She’s sort of at a loss for words—this isn’t a situation she expected to find herself in when she rolled out of bed this morning—but she is above all else a great improviser, so she manages to come up with, “Well, prove it, I guess.”

Bucky wants to go somewhere more private, but her own experiences coupled with eight years married to Mr. Paranoid have taught her not to go anywhere with strange men, and since she thinks interdimensional men probably count as ‘strange’ she insists on staying in the park. To the extent that she expects him to be able to actually present proof, she imagines it in the form of some sort of strange futuristic dimension-hopping wristwatch or mini transporter pad that she can take apart and futz around with. She’s not expecting him to take out an iPhone—perfectly normal, from what she can tell, except for how it has an apple on the back instead of a pear—and start scrolling through his camera roll.

“Photos can be faked, you know,” she tells him. “Like, really easily faked. Like, that kid over there licking the water fountain could probably do it.” But she still leans over his shoulder to see as he shows her photo after photo of a world that someone would have to be really creative and really dedicated to fake: a Manhattan skyline that’s just _slightly_ off in a way she can’t put her finger on, a private jet with the old Stark Industries logo on it, the one that got retired when Stane inherited the company and re-named it, streets with car models she doesn’t recognize and one formal shot of Steve—a slightly different Steve, a Steve who carries himself stiffer and straighter than Toni’s does—giving a speech in dress blues at a podium in front of a tall memorial that looks like it says _Battle of New York_.

Bucky scrolls to the next photo and then abruptly hides the screen from Toni, which is of course her cue to snatch it out of his hands and go running. Bucky chases after her, calling _Toni_ at a decidedly normal volume, clearly trying very hard not to incite that nice Chinese family to phone the police, but Toni uses his aversion to tackling a woman in a public park to her advantage and scrolls through all the photos he was trying to hide.

She gets through four or five dick picks before she recognizes the dick. “Oh my God,” she chokes.

Bucky runs up behind her, panting. “Jesus, you’re fast.” He sees the photo she’s looking at and turns abruptly white. “Uh, Toni—“

Toni holds the phone away from him, keeps scrolling, and sees— _oh dear Lord—_ one of those dorky high-angle smiling nudes that Steve used to send her when she was still in grad school. Then one with vastly better framing clearly taken by a third party, then one of Steve just smiling, then a selfie of Steve and Bucky doing that disgustingly sweet eskimo kissing thing in rumpled sheets, then one of a mysterious third man with a goatee and a glowing circle in his chest who looks disturbingly like her father, then one of the mystery man _sucking Steve’s dick_ , which is when Bucky says, “Okay, that’s enough,” and manages to snag the phone back out of her limp, astonished fingers.

“Do you believe me now?” he asks.

Toni weighs the possibility that her husband has been carrying out a torrid affair with his dead best friend and her father’s dopplegänger against the possibility that an alternate universe version of Bucky Barnes has somehow wandered into her world from another dimension.

“Yeah,” she says, after a minute. “Yeah, I think I believe you.”

***

Seven hours and 28 missed phone calls from Pepper later, while they’re shuffling back into Toni’s hotel room with arms full of pad thai, Toni falls for the oldest trick in the book—she picks up because it’s Bruce calling. Only it’s not Bruce calling, it’s her TA on the bio department’s stolen phone, and Pepper’s out for blood. While she shrieks in Toni’s ear about does she know what time it is and your lecture finished hours ago and for all I know you could have been hit by one of those red double-decker buses, Toni tries to mime to Bucky that in order to get the lights on he has to stick the room key in the slot on the wall, but it’s a lost cause, so eventually she just has to hand him the phone and do it herself.

Of course, Pepper runs out of things to yell about right at that very second, so Bucky’s left holding the phone while her TA’s tinny voice says, _“Hello? Hello? Toni, I swear to God, if you put me in the mini fridge again—“_

Toni swipes the phone back as the lights come on. “I’m here, cool your tits.”

“I could report you to the dean for—“

“Sexual harrassment, yeah, Pep, I know. Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call you, that was really shitty of me, but something came up and I’m gonna need you to get me an extra plane ticket for tomorrow.”

“What?” Pepper says, sounding lost. “An extra plane ticket? What for? What came up?”

Bucky’s unloading steaming takeout containers of pad thai on the hotel desk. _Passport,_ he mouths.

“Oh yeah,” Toni says. “And he doesn’t have a passport.”

“What? Who doesn’t have a passport?”

“Here’s what I need you to do. Run over to my house and see if Steve’s passport is still in the safe. You know the combination, right? Okay, then overnight it to me—actually, you’ll have to move our flight to the day after tomorrow—“

“Oh Jesus,” Pepper is saying, building up to a real meltdown. “Toni, is this a crime? Are you asking me to do a crime? Everyone warned me this would happen when I asked you to be my thesis advisor.”

“They warned you I would make you do a crime?” Toni asks, incredulous.

Bucky raises his eyebrows. Toni shrugs helplessly. “Look, Pepper,” she says. “Just see if Steve’s passport is still there, first, and we’ll take it from there, okay? I promise I won’t make you do any crimes.”

“Okay,” Pepper says tearfully. “How was the lecture?”

Toni walks into the bathroom to tell her all about the sexist Q&A and the one old woman who wore those pastel quilted skirt suits that landed gentry wears and actually seemed interested in Toni’s research, who she figures is the best line of inquiry for independent funding. By the time Pepper’s asked all the questions she wants to ask, mostly about whether Toni talked too fast and, to corroborate her answer of ‘no,’ how much time she spent on each slide, fifteen minutes have passed and Bucky is halfway through the pad thai, frowning intently at a re-run of _Elaine._

“I thought the comedian was the main character,” he complains, as Toni joins him on the bed.

“What,” Toni says, “Jerry? Why would he be the main character? His stand-up sucks.”

Bucky makes a soft sound that Toni chooses to interpret as agreement, and they watch in silence as they finish the rest of the takeout. When the containers are all scraped clean and _Elaine_ gives way to a promo for a new episode of _Doctor When_ on BBC One this Friday, Bucky asks quietly, “What did he do? Steve, I mean.”

It takes Toni by surprise—way more than it should considering everything that’s surprised her today—so much so that she can barely come up with an answer, let alone a lie.

“He stopped loving me,” she says, after a minute. “It happens, I guess.”

Bucky holds her gaze. It sort of feels like he’s holding her. “Did it happen for you?” he asks.

“No,” Toni admits, with a small, humorless smile. “No, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen for me.”

Due to some unknowable systems error of Expedia.com, Toni ended up with a room with two twin beds, instead of the queen she’d asked for, which has bugged her for the last two nights, but at least means Bucky doesn’t have to sleep contorted in the armchair. The more time they spent together today, the more Toni got the sense he hadn’t gotten a proper night’s sleep in a long, long time, and that suspicion is confirmed when he strips down to his boxers and undershirt—showing off a shiny metal prosthetic that she’ll have to poke at when he’s less dead—and falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow. She stays up listening to the sound of his breath and the quiet murmur of the TV in the room next door, poring over what’s shaping up to be her working hypothesis—an anthology of formulas and proofs scribbled on scrap paper from her bag and napkins from the pub where they stopped to talk and a few brochures they stole from a health & wellness spa.

Once it’s quiet—once Toni’s alone with her thoughts—she can’t help but remember London, ten years ago, Steve coming up to her after her lecture on Riemannian geometry with that kind, un-self-conscious smile of his, shaking her hand and saying, _I didn’t understand a word of that._ Saying, _I knew your father_. Saying, _I’m sorry I wasn’t at the funeral, Ms. Stark, I was out of the country,_ and _Can I buy you dinner? Maybe you can explain all that math to me again, but this time take into account that I barely passed algebra._ And later, tucked into a secluded booth in the back of a steamy hot pot restaurant in the trendy part of town, Toni talking with her hands and laughing and Steve loosening his tie and his posture at the same time he was shifting from _Ms. Stark_ to _Toni_ , his golden hair shining in the red lamplight and his cheeks red with liquor, talking about everything in the world and nothing at all. She remembers thinking that he was too good to be true and also that she was never going to see him again once the restaurant finally closed and kicked them out and he walked her back to her hotel, but then Steve had been standing in the shining marble lobby of the Savoy, scratching the back of his neck self-consciously and saying, _You know I’ve been thinking of moving to California._ It probably should’ve been creepy—to anyone but Toni, it probably would’ve been creepy, but she’d been so lonely for so long and Steve had only smiled and laughed when she drunkenly reached out to touch his beard, so she said, _You should stay with me. I have a big house._

Which was how they ended living together before they’d even kissed, Steve moving into a void that Toni didn’t even know was a void until it wasn’t anymore. And they’d lived together for nine years, almost ten, through Toni’s Fields Medal and their wedding, driving to the courthouse together and coming back together, no one else, just the two of them chasing each other through the halls of that big empty house with the doors to all the balconies open and warm Malibu air wafting through their bare legs, tangled in the day bed on the porch overlooking the ocean, wine glasses empty and Steve leaving sticky kisses down the side of her neck, over her breasts, down the center line of her stomach. She remembers how he moved inside her, the first time after they were married, murmuring _Toni, Toni_ against the side of her face, arms braced on either side of her head, tugging her tangled hair, how her orgasm built inside her like a fire and it felt like the very first time, except how their real first time was in Steve’s truck parked at a public beach, neither of them able to wait another second, Steve pushing her bikini aside and mouthing at her wet-cold nipples until they warmed, his hand splayed huge and possessive against the small of her back, sliding sandy fingers inside of her…

Bucky makes a soft noise in his sleep, and Toni blinks up at him. His hair is sticking up above the rumpled comforter like a tuft of grass. She can hear the ocean-lull of his breathing, and she tells herself that she’s not bringing him home just because she misses having someone else in the house, just because there’s a void.

She turns out the light and slides into her own bed, the sheets cool and unwrinkled. With Bucky only a few feet away, she’s out in a matter of seconds. For all that she’s gone most of her life without it, Toni’s always slept better with company.

***

Toni always knew that her husband was a spy.

Steve, on top of being a pretty terrible liar, had made the egregious mistake of marrying someone who’d written most of the base code for the Pentagon’s security system before she decided to devote her life to academia. Still, by the time they met it had been a good half a decade since Toni’d had occasion to use any of her old back doors, so even though she was able to dig up Steve’s (heavily redacted) personnel file and the record of his employment to some agency called SHIELD that was more classified than classified, she’d never been able to get her hands on current information. Possibly because SHIELD was one of those hyper-paranoid espionage agencies that only used paper and kept around a lot of burn bags.

Steve never told her about his work outright. At home they played a fun little game where Toni pretended to believe him when he squirmed across the dinner table and told her about fake ‘work trips’ to boring midwestern cities like Topeka and Sioux Falls, where he allegedly used his big Hercules muscles, fake Russian passport and cache of handguns with the serial numbers scraped off to sell ‘securities solutions’ to paper companies and industrial farms.

At the time Toni had thought that it didn’t bother her, being lied to, as long as he came home at the end of the day and loved her; now, in hindsight, she thinks she was just doing what she always did when something hurt her: tucking it in a box, shelving it, waiting for it to gather dust. She’s never been good at talking about her wounds. Neither of them have. So the in the end the wound had festered, like so many others, until the hurt grew to consume their whole life.

***

Bucky snores all the way back to America. Toni spends the eight hours to New York agonizing over math on cocktail napkins and then the five hours to LA struggling to come to terms with the fact that she might need reinforcements.

She calls Jane Foster from the tarmac. Bucky’s asleep on her shoulder. She’s starting to consider a diagnosis of narcolepsy.

“Hello?” Jane says, and then, “Did you really get hit by a double-decker bus, or was Pepper just having one of those days?”

“One of those days,” Toni says. She doesn’t pitch her voice lower to keep from waking Bucky up—absolutely not. Anyway, he’s slept through three announcements and a baby in the back row screeching bloody murder, it’s not like Toni’s going to wake him up. “Listen, Jane, are you back from Norway?”

“Not until next week. Toni, why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re on the phone in a movie theater, or something. You’re, like, whispering.”

“No I’m not,” Toni says, in a normal voice. “When you get back, I’m gonna need your help on something.”

Jane sighs. “If it’s screwing all of Justin Hammer’s furniture to the ceiling again, you can forget it. One time getting chased out of Stanford by campus security is plenty for me.”

“It’s a physics problem,” Toni invents. “Thought you might be interested.”

“Oh,” Jane says, sounding pleasantly surprised. “In that case, you can pick me up from the airport.”

“Already planning on it, Janey.”

Toni never had a lot of friends, being eight years old in high school and then twelve in college and then sixteen and working on her first doctorate. Jane had been one of the first, in campus housing at MIT, herself only twenty and working on her PhD in Astrophysics. With Rhodey stationed in Iraq, it had been Jane who’d tromped through subzero temperatures to drag Toni out of frat parties, three sheets to the wind, in clothes that would’ve made Anna Jarvis despair, who’d dumped her in bed and used makeup wipes on her face when she was unconscious and made sure she was present for her nine a.m. lecture.

Jane had been the one Toni called when she woke up in a strange bed missing her underwear. She was the one who talked Toni into going to the hospital, who’d sat next to her and held her hand while she suffered the humiliation of campus security telling her she just didn’t have enough proof, that it was her word against his, that she better think about it before she went and ruined a boy’s life because she was having some morning after regrets. Jane was the one who followed Toni across campus while she cried harsh, angry tears, frustrated tears, kicking at snow drifts and shouting, falling abruptly silent every time someone walked past, until she finally ran out of steam and collapsed on a park bench, sweatpants damp with ice melt. And when Toni woke up crying in the middle of the night it was Jane who walked with her to the cafeteria, to the grad student office in the pure math department, bringing her own undergrad papers to grade, or the sci-fi paperback she was devouring, never pushing Toni to talk, just keeping her company.

To this day, Jane is one of only two people on earth—excepting campus security and her rapist—who know what happened to Toni. To this day, she’s the only one who never looked at Toni different because of it.

Bucky jolts awake as the passengers around them stand and start to open the overhead compartments. Toni pats his bedhead. “Morning, sunshine. Have a nice nap?”

He blinks up at her, and the quiet smile that steals over his face is so familiar and fond that for a moment, it takes her breath away. “Sorry,” he rasps, sitting up, stretching. “Been kind of a long year.”

“Yeah?” she asks, hoping he’ll elaborate. He’s been pretty much mum on the whole ‘other universe’ thing.

His eyes tell her he’s wise to her game. “Yeah,” he says, and nothing else.

***

Following their shotgun wedding at the LA County courthouse, one of the first things Steve and Toni did was record a new voicemail message on their home phone. _You’ve reached Mr. and Dr. Rogers_ , it said. _Sorry we can’t come to the phone right now, but you know what they say about the honeymoon period._

This move resulted in a number of very angry and surprised voicemails from colleagues and friends, each of whom seemed to be personally offended by their being left off the (nonexistent) guest list. No amount of reassurances from Steve or orders to ‘suck it up’ from Toni seemed to sway any of them, and in the end, post-coital, laughing over the sounds of Clint Barton from their favorite pizza place crying fake, exaggerated tears into their answering machine, they decided that they might as well go ahead and have a reception.

The wedding had been just for them—it was too fragile a thing, too intense, for either of them to say their vows in front of other people. Steve had proposed over the phone, but Toni forgave him for it immediately because he’d sounded scared and cold and small, he’d been gone for a week longer than planned already, and the wave of relief that hit her when she picked up and heard his voice was so strong she had to sit down. She’d loved him more than she’d ever thought she could possibly love another human being, and the idea—even nebulous as it was—that she could’ve lost him, scared her in a way that was too big to stick words to, so she’d said, “Yes. Of course yes, Steve. I’ll get the rings, okay? You just come home,” and he’d choked out a sob and said, _Okay,_ and if he hadn’t known before that she knew what he did for a living, he certainly did after. The night he got home they made vows to each other in the dark and she held him while he cried against her neck and left nail marks in his shoulders, and in the morning they went and stood in front of a judge.

The reception was small by Stark standards and apparently huge by Rogers ones.

Toni’s side was mostly mathematicians with unibrows and adult acne and a few minor celebrities she’d hung onto from her globetrotting days, Steve’s was a bunch of army buddies and ‘work friends’ who were doing a pretty abysmal job of not acting like super spies. The music was a bunch of undergrads from Toni’s number theory class who had a band called _Gauss Gauss Gauss_ , and Toni’s lawyer Coulson chased the paparazzi out of the parking lot with papers that weren’t really warrants for their arrests. Steve danced Clint’s kids around on his shoes, and someone got video of Jane climbing Dr. Blake like a tree. Toni felt a little awkward in her white dress and missed Jarvis and Anna with a deep, tender ache, but mostly she was deliriously happy, spinning around the dance floor pressed against the solid warmth of her husband, murmuring filth in Steve’s ear just to feel his grip turn bruising on her hips, just to hear his breath quicken. Her discomfort with overt femininity was well worth getting to hear Steve call her _my wife_ in public.

Jane recovered admirably from having been caught with one boob out in the ladies’ restroom and delivered a maid of honor speech that left Toni more than a little misty. Then Bucky got the mic, and for some reason when he stood up the whole room went dead silent.

“Steve,” Bucky started, clear and strong, “I’ve loved you since we were little kids.”

Even Toni’s breath caught in her throat, then, seeing the way Steve looked at Bucky and the way Bucky looked back at him, like there was no one else in the room. She didn’t really understand it then, but later, taking Steve’s weight in a pew at Bucky’s funeral, putting her hands under his so he wouldn’t drop the flag when they handed it to him, she would realize that look had carried more than platonic, brotherly love. _Steve,_ Bucky could’ve said, _I’ve loved you in every way it’s possible to love another human being,_ and it would’ve meant the same thing.

At the end, when Steve was blinking back tears and staring red-eyed into the candle light, holding Toni’s hand so hard she felt her bones grind together, Bucky turned to her with a softer, private smile. “And Toni. Toni, Toni. I don’t know you too well, but I’ve been stationed with Colonel Rhodes, so I’ve heard some stories.” He broke into a wider smile at the laughter from the audience, and Toni didn’t know him well enough to know for sure, but she thought there were tears in his eyes, too. “I don’t think you can possibly understand how good you are for Stevie, but you—you really are. I was…I was really worried about him, until he met you. And now I’m…Now I don’t worry anymore. Because I know you’re gonna take care of him.”

Steve met Bucky’s eyes, something passing between them, and then nodded. Bucky raised his glass and said, “To the happy couple.” Amid all the applause, he managed to slip out unnoticed.

That was the last time Toni ever saw him.

***

There are only a few boxes in the foyer of the Malibu house. Toni has tried to start packing Steve’s things too many times to count in the last three months, and at this point she thinks she might as well give up—their lives are so inextricably intwined that she doesn’t even know how to start dividing it in half.

“Make yourself at home,” she tells Bucky. She steps over Steve’s shoes, kicked off who knows when in the entryway that leads to the garage, and dumps their Out-N-In bags on the counter. “Mi casa es su casa, et cetera.”

Bucky lags behind, looking around at the boxes and the high ceilings and the hole that Toni’s last home improvement attempt left in the floor. “You know, you could hire someone to fix that,” he says.

Toni snorts. “I’m not made of money, Buck.”

“You’re not?”

“No.” She squints at him. “Why? Am I, like, super rich in your universe?”

“No,” Bucky says, “why do you ask?” but his face gives it all away. He’s as bad a liar as Steve is.

Toni pries it out of him over burgers and fries on the balcony—that in his world, she inherited Stark Industries from her dad, turned it into an even more ridiculously profitable endeavor, and had a bank account with nine zeros in it. She trades him her own story: that Howard left Obadiah Stane the company because he didn’t trust her, an emotional, hormonal _woman_ to run it, that he left her only five million and that she used it to buy this house, her mother’s childhood house, which was scheduled to be sold at auction as part of the Maria Carborell estate. Her mother had started divorce preceedings against Howard, right near the end, and he’d been so bitter about it that he’d sent every lawyer he had after her with instructions to not let her take a single red cent, that he’d held Toni somehow responsible for it, too, as if she’d ever been anything more to either of them than a mild inconvenience.

She’s railing against the injustice of the Toni in Bucky’s world getting a father who wasn’t a raging misogynist when Bucky cuts in awkwardly. “I guess I should probably tell you that you’re a guy, where I come from. Anthony.”

Toni blinks. “Huh. Am I hot?”

Bucky chokes on his fries. “What?”

“Am I, like, ripped? Or do I have a sad, skinny little nerd body?“

“I’m not really the best judge.”

“Oh, come on, don’t give me that tough guy crap.“

“I mean I’m kind of biased,” Bucky says, squinting into the sun glaring off the ocean just so he doesn’t have to look at her. “I was in love with you. But I think you won Sexiest Man Alive once or twice.”

Now it’s Toni’s turn to choke on her fries.

When she recovers she suddenly remembers part of what he said and asks, “You were in love with me.”

Bucky nods, looking embarrassed about it.

“You _were,”_ Toni repeats. “As in, not any more.” She feels vaguely nauseous. Two universes, two loves, and somehow she managed to drive them both away. “What did I do? Did I work too much? Did I—was I—“

“You died,” Bucky says.

Toni stares at him. Then she turns and stares out at the ocean, at the glittering, blistering-white water and the dark shadows of seagulls and the sloping green line of the Malibu hills. She’s hit by a sudden wave of sadness for Anthony, who she’ll never meet but who somehow through space and time feels like a brother, a best friend, someone she should’ve known to look out for and should’ve been around to save.

“Toni,” Bucky’s saying. “Hey, Tones, it’s alright.”

He reaches out and takes her hands, grabbing hard enough to steady her, and she realizes she’s crying. She meets his eyes and tries to smile, and he’s smiling and crying too, and suddenly the whole situation is so ridiculous that she has to laugh. He laughs with her, even though nothing’s really funny, and by the time they manage to stop themselves they’re on the floor leaning against the railing, ankles tangled together. Toni leans her head against the glass and stares at him from closer than is strictly polite, studying the color of his eyes and the everpresent crease between his eyebrows that’s so sharp and straight it’s almost a right angle.

She reaches out and thumbs his scruffy chin. He smiles at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing.” But she leaves her thumb where it is. “What about Steve?”

Bucky frowns, face muscles shifting under her hand. “What about him?”

“If me and you were together, then what—oh.” She remembers the photos she saw on his phone in Kensington Gardens, him and Steve and some third mystery man who must have been Anthony. “All three of us?”

Bucky turns his head just enough to brush his lips against the pad of her thumb, too light to really be called a kiss. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “All three of us.”

“Huh,” Toni says.

***

She tries to picture it, lying in bed that night. She can’t sleep—when she’s alone in bed she can never sleep until the pale early hours of the morning, when the sky is starting the lighten outside and the birds are singing and she only has an hour or two until her alarm clock goes off. Pepper and lesser TAs before her have accused Toni of being an insomniac; Bruce had, on one particularly bad occasion when she had the flu and Steve was in ‘Cincinnati,’ come over and slept horizontally across the foot of the bed with his arms crossed, wrapped in one of his sweaters like a body in a coffin so that Toni could listen to the sounds of his breathing but there could never be any accusations of anything untoward.

Bucky’s down a long hall and a flight of stairs in the only guest bedroom they could find sheets for. The past 72 hours have gotten her so used to his constant presence that the length of the house suddenly feels like miles. Not that Toni has any right to Bucky in her bed; not that she’s ever even _thought_ about Bucky in her bed, not even that Fourth of July where he came over for Steve’s birthday and they all got very drunk and the two of them kept listing towards each other on the couch like their bodies knew something their brains didn’t, lips shiny with liquor, eyes magnetized. She’d sat on a stool at the kitchen counter playing with the label on her own beer bottle and trying to catch up to the math her subconscious was doing without her, how she’d suddenly been bone-sure that Steve wanted nothing more for his birthday than for her to walk across the room and climb into his best friend’s lap. Only that was crazy—it was crazy. Only it wasn’t—maybe, in hindsight, knowing what she does about alternate dimensions and the shape of Bucky’s mouth under her thumb and how Steve had knelt at that grave for three hours before she managed to get him inside out of the rain.

Only it was _,_ it _is_ , it still is. It’s never going to be the three of them or even the two of them in any combination that involves Toni, because Steve isn’t here anymore. His side of the bed is empty; his pillow is cold.

She really should take off her ring. She really should make Coulson bother Steve more about signing those papers. She really should box up his stuff and drive it over to the apartment in Marina del Rey she’s only vaguely aware of, but she thinks some part of her is still functioning like this is all a bad dream. Like she’s going to wake up. Like it’s not really over.

On her way down to the lab she takes a detour past Bucky’s room just to peer through the cracked door at his hair like a tuft of grass above the sheets. He’s calm and quiet, and the mound of sheets moves up and down with his breath.

She can picture it, is the thing. It’s actually really easy to picture, even though it hurts a lot to do it.

***

“So I guess I’m dead, then,” Bucky says the next morning, instead of one of the customary morning greetings like ‘hi’ or ‘she lives!’

It takes Toni a minute to process him standing in her kitchen in a pair of Steve’s joggers flipping pancakes before her brain wakes up enough to say, “Where’d you get that idea?”

“Well,” he slides a pancake—blueberry, her favorite—onto a stack that’s already six inches high. “If I was still alive, I wouldn’t let Steve throw away the best thing that ever happened to him.”

Toni makes herself a cup of coffee without answering, then goes to sit at the counter. “This isn’t a real happy conversation to have first thing in the morning, Buck.”

“That’s okay. I’m used to having unhappy conversations at all times of day.”

“Right.” She sips her coffee, stalling, trying to figure out the right words to say what she needs to say, as gently as she can possibly say it. After a second she realizes she doesn’t have to—Bucky told her yesterday like pulling off a band-aid, and even if he didn’t tell her _how_ Anthony died, she figures he can handle this news if she gives him the same matter-of-fact treatment.

“You died a couple weeks after our wedding. Killed in action, officially, although unofficially I don’t think you were in the army any more than Steve is in corporate security.”

There were more gory details, of course. The casualty officers who’d come to their door hadn’t given them any, but Steve had come to Toni later—after he’d put his fist through a plate glass window and the armed serviceman waiting in the car had run in with the medic, after Steve had gone quiet and tight and muttered his apologies, his bandage-handed salute, as he saw the officers out the door—and asked her to get them for him. She hadn’t thought it was a good idea, but couldn’t stomach the thought of positioning herself as somehow ‘against’ him in all this, so she’d promised to do it while he got some sleep; then, later, sitting on the foot of their bed and debating whether or not to wake him, she’d flipped through page after page of heavily redacted after-action report, preliminary investigations into culpability, death certificates. The report from the medic in Afghanistan who’d officially declared Bucky dead said that when the IED went off under his Humvee the detached side door had broken his neck and nearly decapitated him.

“Did I come back?” Bucky asks, faux-casual.

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” He turned off the stove and handed her a plate of pancakes; butter, no syrup.

“Did you come back from the dead?” Toni presses. “Is that what you’re asking?”

Bucky shoves a triangle of pancake in his mouth to avoid having to answer. It’s a majorly Steve tactic. He chews, swallows, and before he can go for another forkful, she slides his plate away.

He gives her a hangdog look, then sighs. “Look, I’m just trying to feel out how much is the same here.”

“You came back from the dead in your universe?”

Bucky shrugs. Toni’s mind boggles. “How? I mean— _How?”_

“I’m not so clear on the specifics,” Bucky admits, “but it involved evil Soviet scientists and memory wiping and giving me this shiny arm.” He taps his metal fingers on the counter, demonstratively, like Toni could possibly miss his shiny metal arm when he’s standing in front of her shirtless.

“Also,” he adds, stealing back his pancakes, “I was born in 1917.”

“Jesus,” Toni says. “Are you sure you’re not from a comic book?”

Bucky smiles. “No. But speaking of comic books—do you guys have Captain America, here?”

“What, like Peggy Carter? Yeah, we have her.”

Bucky spends the rest of the morning laughing, and Toni spends the rest of the morning following him around the house demanding to be let in on the joke, until finally Bucky collapses on the day bed and says, “Steve. In my world, it was Steve.”

***

Toni doesn’t remember much about going to the hospital, the night it happened. She remembers, vaguely, sitting on a table with her feet in stirrups in a crinkly paper hospital gown, Jane’s small, tear-streaked face in the corner, not allowed to hold her hand until after they swabbed under her fingernails. She doesn’t remember the doctor coming in after, or remember what he said to her—Jane was there, nodding, and she trusted Jane to handle it.

Maybe that was why the miscarriage had come as a total surprise. She’d been at work, sitting in her tiny office in her new ergonomic desk chair with her new stretchy-waist jeans on, trying to break it to one of her undergrad students that he wasn’t cut out for a career in pure math if he couldn’t figure out how to factor a quadratic equation, when she felt a sharp cramp and a sudden wetness between her legs. She’d sent him out, brusque and more than a little mean, picked up her desk phone and called Bruce.

Later accounts—ill-informed, disguised as gossip—assured Toni that he’d run flat-out from the biosciences building, leaving his class in the middle of a lab. When he got to her, in between turning an alarming shade of white, shaking so bad he knocked over a cup of decaf coffee, and reminding her he wasn’t that kind of doctor, he managed to call an ambulance, call Steve, and hold her hand while she begged him to tell her that what she thought was happening wasn’t actually happening.

“I can’t,” he’d said, quiet and sorrowful, legs drawn up next to her on the floor. “I can’t, Toni, I’m sorry.”

He kept holding her hand in the ambulance, and held it all the way into the ER, until Steve showed up with that look on his face that showed up whenever something like this happened, when Bucky died and when Toni wrapped his pick-up truck around a tree and got seventeen stitches in her shoulder. She’d always thought of it as his ‘under control’ face, his spy face, and normally she hated it more than anything in the world, but she didn’t have the energy to hate it, then. Seeing it just crumpled something inside of her, like stepping on a tin can.

Bruce had left, her blood on his khakis, and Steve had sat on the edge of her bed and held her face in his hands, resting his forehead against hers, and she’d grabbed onto his forearms. “Be sad with me,” she whispered. “I need you to be sad with me.”

His eyes were red, but dry. “I am sad,” he said, voice catching. “God, baby, I’m so sad.”

But that wasn’t what she meant at all, and before she could figure out how to tell him that the doctor was back and he was saying something about ‘previous trauma’ and she told him she wanted Steve to leave. It was a knee-jerk reaction, because she hadn’t ever told him, and she rationalized that she didn’t want him to hear it from a doctor but really she just didn’t want him to hear it at all.

There was no getting around it, though—not later, in the dark foyer of their house, when Toni’s knees finally gave out and Steve sank to the floor with her, pulling her into his lap. Normally this was when she would’ve had a quip or a joke to lighten the mood, but now she had nothing. She felt hollowed out.

“I was raped in college,” she said, after a long minute of just feeling Steve’s chest rise and fall under her. “The doctor said the trauma to my cervix might have had something to do with it.”

_“Toni,_ ” he said, turning his face into her hair, and didn’t say anything else.

There wasn’t really anything else to be said, Toni didn’t think. She’d gone ten years without talking about what had happened in college; she could go the rest of her life without talking about this newest tragedy.

Except Toni’s unwillingness to talk about anything and Steve’s habit of knuckling through the hard times with a stiff upper lip and a lot of home improvement projects didn’t exactly make for a good healing recipe, and over the course of a year they stopped talking, Steve started getting calls in the middle of the night from someone named Sharon, and Toni threw herself into lattices, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebra like she was throwing herself off a cliff, so she didn’t have to think about how she’d gone from happily married with a baby on the way to hiding in her office so she didn’t have to watch her husband fall out of love with her.

Steve still looked surprised when she told him she wanted him to move out—after all, she’d never told him she knew he was a spy, so he probably figured he could sneak this one past her, too.

If he’d argued, if he’d said she was wrong, she probably would’ve believed him. She always erred on the side of believing in him. But he hadn’t; he’d grabbed his go-bag and walked out the door.

***

Toni spends the week after she gets back from London sequestered in the house with Bizarro Bucky, making Pepper cover her classes and ordering in apocalyptic amounts of Chinese food.

On Saturday Toni puts the top down on the Testarossa and uses the time in LAX traffic to touch up the tan that lapsed in London. By mutual agreement and paranoia, Bucky stayed back at the mansion, where there are less CCTV cameras and less Janes who might recognize him from the wedding and freak out, so the passenger seat is empty when Jane comes pouring out of the international arrivals hall with approximately eighteen suitcases.

“It’s work stuff!” she protests, when Toni accuses her of trying to dress nice for Dr. Blake.

They manage to get two cases in the trunk—the ‘important’ ones—and two cases in the back seat, and Jane has to flag down a Lyft Lux driver and pay him to follow them out to the house with the rest.

“So,” she says, once they’re on their way, stop-starting through traffic again. “Tell me about this mysterious physics problem.”

“Nuh-uh,” Toni says. “You’ve gotta wait til we’re parked. If I tell you while we’re driving you’ll freak out and make me crash the car.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to _freak out_ over physics, Toni. Come on, we’re practically parked anyways.”

She’s half right—the freeway _is_ a parking lot, but this is the same Jane who once slapped Dr. Selvig in the face because he told her she was wrong about Einstein-Rosen bridges, so Toni thinks her caution about the freak out is totally warranted.

_“Toni,”_ Jane whines.

Toni takes one look at her big, comical puppy-dog eyes and groans. “Fine,” she says. “Fine, but no freak outs, okay? You have to promise me.”

“I promise,” Jane lies, without a hint of remorse.

Thirty seconds later, after Toni’s told her, expressed sympathy at her incredulity, and told her again, Jane flings her hands out so hard she knocks the gearstick into reverse and Toni almost reverse rear ends a very angry taco truck. “You promised!” she shouts, indignant, over the sound of the taco truck’s horn.

“You should never have believed me!” Jane accuses, which Toni knows is as good of an admission of guilt as she’s ever going to get. “Oh my God. Do you know what this means? The implications for _physics alone!”_

Toni mostly tunes her out on the rest of the drive up to Malibu. More than a decade of friendship has taught her that Jane has a real problem with organizing her thoughts unless she has a whiteboard or a piece of paper in front of her, so there’s no use trying to parse it out until they’re back in the lab.

They’re not even a full day into it when Jane says, pretend-lightly, “You know who you should call?”

Toni’s across the room scribbling equations on some clear Plexiglass and nibbling idly on half a grilled cheese sandwich. For some reason the cheddar is making her feel nauseous. “Who?” she asks, without thinking about it, and then, when her brain catches up to Jane’s odd tone, “ _No._ No way.”

“Come on,” Jane says. “Reed is like, the poster child for multiverse theory—“

“No! Out of the question.”

“Just because he beat you at the IMO when you were like twelve—“

“That’s not why!” Toni protests. “Reed is a hellion and I’d like to blast him off into space.”

Jane gives her the look she always does when she thinks Toni’s being unreasonable and she’s decided not to talk to her until she changes her attitude, which is how Toni ends up on a red eye to New York, popping Dramomine and wondering why now after thirty years of being able to do barrel rolls in Rhodey’s fighter without popping a sweat she’s suddenly feeling like she might puke while they’re taxiing onto the runway.

“You’re glowing,” the flight attendant tells her, handing over a pack of peanuts, and Toni thinks _oh, shit_.

Bucky calls while she’s in the airport Rite Aid in JFK, looking at pregnancy tests and feeling more alone than she has since she was standing in front of Anna and Jarvis’ graves, fourteen years old, thinking about how she didn’t want to go home so maybe she’d just walk for a while.

On the last ring, she abruptly decides to pick up. “Hi,” she says.

“Hey.” Even over the phone, Bucky’s voice stirs something inside of her—makes her feel a little better and a little worse all at once, because of how far away he is—which is probably bad. “You get in okay?”

“Yeah,” Toni says. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Bucky says gently.

“The flight was fine,” Toni amends. “I ate some peanuts. Took a nap. The plane didn’t crash.” _God_ , she has no idea what brand of test to buy. She recognizes the pink box of the one she bought last time, but she feels like choosing that one again would jinx it, and even thinking about it—thinking about any of this at all—makes her want to rent one of those nap pods and curl up in a protective ball.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Bucky asks. She can imagine the face he’s making: skeptical, kind of frowny. If she were home he would try to box her out of leaving a room until she told him the truth. “You sound weird.”

“Thanks,” Toni says.

“I just mean—“

“Yeah,” she says, softer. “Yeah, I know. I’m fine, Buck. Really. I’ll call you after I talk to Reed, okay?”

Reluctantly, he lets her go. She buys a pregnancy test with a generic white box and avoids the pitying, sympathetic look of the middle-aged woman behind the counter, who must sense that she doesn’t want to talk about it, and carries out the transaction in silence. There must not be too many happy people buying pregnancy tests in airports.

In the cavernous ladies’ room, Toni finds an open stall way at the end, pees on the stick, and sits on her overnight bag while she waits, looking anywhere but at the test sitting on the closed toilet lid. She wants to call Steve, but at the same time she doesn’t, because maybe it’s nothing. Maybe the stress of the divorce has made her miss a period, that’s all. Maybe he wouldn’t even pick up, because he’s with Sharon now. Maybe—probably—if she called, he would drop everything and come get her, because he’d be as scared about her being pregnant again as she was, except he’d be coming as her distantly platonic ex-husband, not someone who could wrap her up in a hug and kiss her head and promise her that everything was gonna be alright, pick her up bridal-style off the bathroom floor and spin her around and around in the living room until she broke into raw, helpless post-crying laughter and forgot to worry about all that crap she’d read on WebMD. Except now she’s gone through one pregnancy, and she’s lived through the worst-case scenario, and she knows that all that stuff on WebMD is nothing to laugh at. And now she’s remembering it, sitting on her suitcase in a miniscule stall in the airport bathroom—the blood and the lightheaded fear and her grip leaving white marks on Bruce’s hand in the back of the ambulance, and now she must be hyperventilating, because someone knocks on the door and calls gently, “Hello? Are you okay in there?”

Toni puts a hand over her mouth and tries to breathe slow and deep through her nose. This must not be enough of an answer, because whoever’s on the other side of the door says, “I’m a doctor. I can help you, if you need it.”

***

That’s how Toni ends up missing her brunch date with her mortal enemy to visit Dr. Christine Palmer’s ER, where she sneaks Toni in the back (“So they don’t see me and make me go on-call”), stashes her in an empty exam room and filches an ultrasound from obstetrics.

“If you’re really only three months along, there won’t be anything to see, yet,” Christine tells her, running the ultrasound wand through the cold gel on her stomach. “But we should be able to hear…”

_There it is_ , she says in a stage whisper, as the tiny _whump_ of the baby’s heartbeat fills the room.

“Holy shit,” Toni says softly. “Can I call someone?”

Christine favors her with a knowing smile. “Go ahead.”

Later, Toni will blame her decision on hormones and impulsiveness, but when Bucky picks up and says, “You told me you were okay,” she can only laugh and say, “Listen to this, Buck.”

She holds the phone up to where Christine points on the ultrasound machine, and when she puts it back to her ear Bucky is saying, “What is that? It sounds like a heartbeat.”

“It is a heartbeat.”

There’s a long pause. Then, “It sounds like a baby’s heartbeat.”

Toni smiles. “It is a baby’s heartbeat.”

“Whose baby, Toni?”

“Now you’re just being deliberately obtuse,” she teases. “Mine. And Steve’s.”

Bucky makes a soft sound. “Holy shit. Okay. I’m gonna pick you up from the airport.”

“I drove to the airport.”

“I’ll take a cab and then drive back with you, then.”

“Okay,” Toni capitulates, because she’s feeling too many emotions to argue. “You can pick me up.”

“That the father?” Christine asks, when Toni ends the call.

“Not exactly,” Toni says.

Christine makes a face that says she doesn’t want to know what that means at all, and hands Toni a paper towel to wipe her stomach clean. And it’s good she doesn’t ask, because Toni doesn’t know how to explain to this woman who just rescued her from a panic attack in JFK that her ex-husband’s dead best friend from another dimension has stepped very neatly into the void that Steve left when they split.

***

A week after she kicked Steve out, Toni got home from work, headlights carving up the dark driveway at eleven p.m. and found him sitting on the front step of the house. “You changed the locks!” he accused, as she got out of the car. “What the hell? This is my house, too!”

“Actually,” she slammed the door, “it’s not.”

In hindsight that was pretty shitty of her—no matter what she felt Steve had done to her, the Malibu house had been his home for almost as long as it had been hers, and no matter how close to the chest he played it, she knew that his past didn’t involve much in the way of warmth or stability, apart from Bucky. But in the moment she was incandescently mad about Sharon Carter, whose personnel file she’d dug up and whose calls Steve responded to at one in the morning, and even more than that she was hurt by how he’d slowly been drifting away from her for so long that when she remembered what it was like before—before, when she’d get out of bed with her six a.m. alarm and feel Steve’s hand on her waist, pulling her back, his voice rumbling _Five more minutes_ —it was like a spear through her chest. So she’d stormed past him into the house, Steve shouting behind her, and she’d given back her best vitriol, until they’d both been yelling—really yelling. squaring off over the couch in the living room, Steve’s face red and his forehead creased in desperate anger and Toni aiming to kill, going after his sanctimonious nature and his secrecy and his inability to open up to her even after nine years of marriage, telling him she never really liked that thing he did with his tongue, and somehow that was the thing that did it, Steve going slack-faced and shocked, echoing, _You didn’t?_ And Toni, stubborn to the last, saying, _No,_ and Steve stalking across the room toward her, looming over her, close enough that she could feel the heat of his body, begging, _Don’t lie to me, Toni. Please. Not about this._

There must have been something in his voice that tipped her off, because instead of pushing and pushing until one of them broke, like she’d usually do, she felt all the fight go out of her at once, and said, _Okay. Okay, I won’t._

And when he raised his hand to grab the side of her neck, jerking her toward him, she went without fighting, because it had been ages since he’d manhandled her, since before the miscarriage and before her confession, and she’d _missed_ it, missed her husband, how he moved her around like she weighed nothing, made her feel acutely the difference in their sizes and the breadth of his strength, the inherent restraint of his gentleness; she’d missed all the idiosyncracies of him, the scarred patch on his chest where no hair grew, the way he hid his smiles against her skin, like he was embarrassed about them even as the rest of him was laid bare before her, how his hands always stuttered on their way between her legs, like he was still so awed, even after so many years of marriage, that she would let him have this. Toni really _did_ like that thing he did with his tongue, and that night she liked it two times in their marital bed before Steve even managed to get his pants off—Toni shoving him over and stripping him, fingers rough and urgent on the button, practically ripping the jeans off him before he caught her hands in his and kissed her wedding ring, before she swung a leg over his hips and sunk down onto him, still wet and easy from his mouth. She’d wound their fingers together and pressed his hands back onto the mattress and leaned down to feel his bare skin between her breasts, the warhorse drive of his hips forcing her higher, and higher, and higher, to an orgasm that hurt almost as much as it felt good.

She has vague memories of him lying in bed next to her in the night, wide awake, running his fingers through her hair. Of tears on his face, crystalline in the moonlight, bending gently to kiss her slack mouth. _I had that dream again last night,_ he might have told her, while she was asleep, _the one where Bucky knocks on our door carrying his own head._ And, _He died again. I couldn’t get through to him._ And _I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry._ Voice breaking, thick, _I can never seem to save the ones that matter. I don’t know how to fix this, baby._

But Toni was alone when she woke up in the morning, no sign of Steve but his ringing absence, so she can’t be sure that those weren’t just wishful words, conjured in the cradle of a heavy sleep.

***

“You haven’t told him yet, have you?” is the first thing Bucky says.

Toni’s had an Erdós number of 2 since she was 18 and her IQ flirts aggressively with 170; she probably should’ve seen this question coming. But she just spent a whole five hour flight puking, and she spent the last two days watching Reed Richards show off for some pretty blonde grad student who only had eyes for some creepy eastern European guy, so her advance warning system is a little shot.

“I’ve been kind of busy solving your interdimensional problem,” she says, trying to deflect.

“You solved it?” Bucky asks. Oddly, he doesn’t sound hopeful at all. He sounds—sad? disappointed? “I thought you said it was impossible.”

“Jane said it was impossible,” Toni corrects. “Jane is a naysayer and not to be trusted.” Abruptly she decides to nip this in the bud and adds, “I’m not sure if I’m going to tell Steve.”

Bucky stops in the middle of baggage claim. A very large man in a t-shirt that says _DUKES FAMILY VACATION_ gives him a nasty look as he redirects his luggage cart to go around.

Toni makes it all the way to the door before she realizes she’s not being followed. She sighs, hangs her head, and loops back to Bucky. “I didn’t mean that,” she says. “I’m gonna tell him. I just need some time.”

“He’d want to be involved,” Bucky says. “With the pregnancy, I mean. The kid too, of course, I’m just saying—“

“I know,” Toni rescues him. “I know he’d want to be involved, and he can be, but—Look, can we not do this in the airport? Can we go somewhere else? Let’s go somewhere else.”

Bucky insists on driving even though Toni makes a point of listing all the things she’s already done today that could have just as easily killed her and her unborn child, so she has to make do with being a very mouthy backseat driver and insisting he stop twice—once for donuts, once for (decaf) coffee, because the coffee at the donut place was terrible and the donuts at the coffee place were so bad it wasn’t even worth speaking of—before they made it to Toni’s favorite scenic spot, the gravel lot overlooking a public beach where she’d got the call that she had been shortlisted for a Nobel. Granted, she hadn’t won the Nobel—it had gone to Ivan Vanko, the uncultured wild child of the Siberian State Aerospace University, who had _turned it down_ because of his arrogant holier-than-thou thing against prizes—but some misplaced line of coding in her brain still associated this unremarkable stretch of the Pacific Coast highway with the surprised joy she’d felt when she answered the phone that morning. No one else is here, so she and Bucky claim the picnic table closest to the edge, looking out over a mostly-empty beach and an overcast sky.

“I was pregnant before,” she tells Bucky, when he’s been quiet for something like five or ten minutes, waiting for her to speak. “Two years ago, ish. I had a miscarriage.”

Some part of her—the part that still entertained the possibility that she might ever talk about this again—had expected to break down in tears the second she opened her mouth. But she feels oddly at peace, pulling apart a glazed donut, looking over her sunglasses at the gray ocean, the cool breeze nipping at her hair.

Maybe it’s the company. Not saying anything, but not because he’s forcing it all down, not because he’s never going to speak at all. Just because he’s listening.

“When I was sixteen I was raped at a frat party,” she continues. “Roofies, too much to drink, you know how it goes. Girl wakes up with internal bleeding and no memory of the night before, but they still call it a ‘he said, she said.’ The doctor, after my miscarriage—he said it might have had something to do with it.”

And this— _this_ is the part that gets her, even after what feels like months and months of crying in the shower and laying on the floor in her office hating herself because she picked up the phone to call Steve and she couldn’t, because she could have just looked the other way and kept him but she didn’t and now he’s gone.

“I told Steve, after. I hadn’t told him before.” She picks at the styrofoam rim of her coffee cup, just to have something to do with her hands, so she doesn’t have to meet Bucky’s eyes. “I think he…I don’t know, I guess it changed something. It’s not his fault. It just happens sometimes, with some people, I guess. And there was this woman at work, I think, he was always leaving in the middle of the night, and he didn’t touch me anymore, and…”

She smiles ruefully, smudges a tear away with her thumb. “There was a lot between us, you know. I guess it just got to be too much for him.”

Bucky catches her hand as she drops it and squeezes her fingers. “Hey.”

“It’s fine.” Toni feels her smile flicker.

“It’s not fine.” She looks up at him for the first time and sees his eyes are huge and sad, like her words have blown something wide open inside of him. “I’m gonna punch him the next time I see him.”

“What if it’s not in this universe?” Toni asks, half-joking.

“It’ll have to be. In mine, he…left.” His thumb moves over the knob of her knuckle, reverent, careful. Toni wonders if he was ever so careful with Anthony, or if it’s just her, because she’s a woman here. “Somehow it seems like every Steve in every universe finds a way to hurt you.”

It hits Toni like a kick to the chest. “Did I forgive him, in your universe?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you did.”

“Some days I want to,” Toni admits. “I miss his bravery, and his shitty puns, and even that stubborn fucking patriotism…” Bucky’s tired laugh tells her his Steve was the same, and she smiles—a genuine smile, this time. “But I know even if I picked up the phone and told him to come home right now it would never be like it was before. It can’t be. We’re different people now. We hurt each other. And he doesn’t even—“

“He does,” Bucky says, one hundred percent certain. “I know it doesn’t matter with all the other shit he’s done, but even when things were at their worst in my world, he always loved you.”

Toni wants to believe it. More than anything, she wants to believe it, since if Steve doesn’t still love her, it will never even matter if she decides to forgive him, to take him back.

But she can’t believe it. Because she figures if he loved her, he probably would’ve called.

***

Toni gets an angry call from her department head at nine a.m. informing her that if she doesn’t show up for her morning lecture they’re going to give Pepper her job, so she throws on one of her chunkiest sweaters to hide the baby bump, puts the Thingamajig 3000 in the back seat of the Testarossa, and arrives in her graduate Riemannian geometry seminar just as her beleaguered students are sighing and packing up their things. “Nuh-uh,” she says, door slamming behind her. “It’s 10:14. Siddown, eager beavers.”

The seminar only has four students in it—Shuri, who doesn’t have a last name, Scott, who’s failing, Pietro, who Toni figures must be some sort of idiot savante, and Peter, who looks about fourteen and is so cute she wants to put him in her pocket. Toni figured out pretty early on that Scott was a lost cause and the other three could handle Riemann in their sleep, so she doesn’t fight it too hard when they start asking questions about the Thingamajig 3000 and the class devolves rapidly into a troubleshooting session for Toni’s dimensional portal-ripper. Scott actually turns out to be the most help, with his mech-e background, and he and Toni are down under the desks that are serving as a makeshift jig, pointing at wires and studiously adjusting their eyeglasses, when the door flies open and the shooting starts.

For as long as she can remember, Toni’s had math running through her head like a constant song. Equations and proofs and unsolvable problems and avenues of thinking overlapping to create a map of the world, a numerical blueprint of everything that had always been easier for her to navigate than reality.

At the first gunshot, for the first time in her life, the song in her head falls abruptly silent.

The gunmen—a half dozen of them, in black tactical gear and masks that hide their faces—don’t move like the panicked, teenage school shooters Toni’s seen on the news. They move like professionals. Like Steve.

Toni can hear screams in the hall, the sounds of people running, more gunfire. The lockdown alarm sounds, too late to matter in this building, and shuts off almost as soon as it’s started. The gunmen in the lecture hall force them to their feet—Scott stops to help Toni when her sweater rides up and he sees her baby bump, eyes wide and mouth set in a tight line—then sit them down all in a line in the front row.

Toni’s never been in an active shooter situation before, but she thinks this probably isn’t one. Normal shooters don’t wear masks, they don’t move in military formation, and they don’t take hostages.

Her suspicions are confirmed when one of the men steps forward and says, “Which one of you is Dr. Rogers?”

Ice runs down Toni’s spine. For a second her mouth feels stuck closed, but then she sees Peter starting to think about lying and saying it’s him, so before he can she says, “Me. I’m Dr. Rogers.”

They jerk her up roughly.

“Hey!” Scott says behind her, and she hears an impact—someone hitting him.

“Wait,” she says. “Wait, if I’m the one you want, just let them go. Let my students go.”

Over their protests, the head honcho stares at her, eyes narrowing in the window of his mask. “You’re going to build us a dimensional portal,” he says. “And you’re going to do it now.”

“Yeah,” Toni says, even though she’s still at least three weeks out from a viable prototype. “Yeah, okay. But only if you let them go.”

After a long moment, he nods.

Scott, because he’s a dumbass of the highest order and also, apparently, very noble, insists on staying with her, which starts Peter up trying to insist the same thing, until Shuri hits him upside the head and drags him out by the hoodie. Toni exchanges a significant look with Scott as they disappear out the lecture hall doors. Scott swallows, gives her a nod, and says, “Okay. Let’s get to work, Dr. Rogers.”

Toni decides right then and there that Scott’s getting an A+.

Under normal circumstances this is impossible work, but with six guns pointed at her, a terrified grad student handing her wrenches, and every single one of her life’s regrets running through her head on loop, it’s like trying to thread a needle on the back of a horse with hands covered in KY jelly.

_She should’ve called Steve. She should’ve confronted him about Sharon. She should’ve made him read some 21st century literature on victimhood and blame. She should’ve admitted she knew he was a spy. She should’ve called and told him about the baby the second she knew. She should’ve reminded him she loved him more, even though they were never the sort of people who talked about their feelings. She should’ve picked up the phone in the middle of the night and asked him to come back, told him she couldn’t sleep without him, that she missed the shape of him beside her in space, that her skin missed his hands, that it ached, knowing he was in someone else’s bed, that he was coming apart inside someone else’s body. She should’ve kissed Bucky in the kitchen this morning, should’ve told him that she’d heard him shouting in the night but didn’t know whether to go to him because Steve always liked to be left alone after his nightmares, that she was sorry, that she wished she could make all the hurts he wouldn’t talk about go away. She should’ve told Steve back when his Bucky was still alive that she didn’t care if he loved two people as long as one of them was her, that he didn’t have to cut out part of himself just to make things easier on her, that if he wanted they could find a way to fit Bucky into their life, their marriage, their bed._

Halfway through stripping a wire, she stops, pushes her glasses up onto her head, and puts her hands over her face. “Dr. Rogers?” Scott asks.

She takes a deep, shaky breath. “I’m okay, Scott. Just give me a minute.”

Vaguely, she’s aware of Scott telling the gunmen that she’s pregnant, she just needs a few minutes to calm down, this is very stressful for her and stress is bad for the baby and if they weren’t such assholes they’d back off and give them some room to breathe.

They must listen to him, because a second later, he’s kneeling in front of her, murmuring, “Dr. Rogers?”

Toni takes one last breath and pulls her hands away from her face. “I’m okay, Scott. Promise.”

“Good,” he says, but from the tone of his voice she can tell there’s something else. “Good, that’s good.”

“What is it?” she asks, keeping her voice low.

In a whispered rush he says, “You know we can’t do this, right? Your prototype is good but it’s miles away—“

“Yeah,” she interrupts. “Yeah, I know.”

“So what are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” Toni admits. “I’m working on it.”

They work for another hour or so before Toni realizes she can use the ‘pregnant’ thing to her advantage, and tells them she has to go to the ladies’ room. As predicted, none of them have much experience with her condition, so when she says the baby’s kicking her bladder and she has to go _now_ no one bats an eye.

She has hazy childhood memories of being instructed by the Stark Industries security team of what she should do in a kidnapping situation, to try to escape before they were forced to pay ransom, and one of the things she remembers is to ask to go to the bathroom, so she could see how many men they had, where she was being kept, whether there was a clear egress route she could use if she managed to slip free. There was also some sort of code she was supposed to use over the phone, or, if they wrote out her message and made her record it, a pattern of pauses and sobs that could communicate information about where she was being held, who had taken her. But Toni’s mind is shaky and terrified and she wonders how anyone could’ve expected a _child_ to remember all that, to actually do it.

In the hallway she tries to force herself to count, but the men are moving and her mind is working in fits and spurts and she feels like she misses some, coutns some twice. Her escort goes inside the bathroom to check it, then stands outside the door while she turns the tap on and splashes water on her face and tries not to hyperventilate.

Steve will come for her, she knows. Eventually, Steve will come for her, even if he has to fly halfway around the world and disobey his superiors to do it. But she doesn’t know if she has time to wait.

Her reflection stares back at her from the mirror, dark circles under her eyes, hair she hasn’t washed in three days, thin cheeks that prove just how much morning sickness has been taking out of her.

“You’re gonna live,” she tells herself, voice low and stern. “You’re gonna get out of this, and you’re gonna fix everything.”

Which is, of course, when the shooting starts again.

***

Later, when Toni uses her backdoor in the FBI’s system to take a look at the after-action report, what she’ll learn is this:

Shortly after 11:00, local police received a report of an active shooter at Caltech’s campus. They arrived on the scene to find absolute chaos, the lockdown alarm disabled, students and faculty running in every direction. Gunfire was reported from almost every building on campus, but there wasn’t a single casualty. The gunmen—whoever they were—were firing into the sky, warning shots.

By the time the FBI arrived on the scene, things had calmed down a little and SWAT plus the local police had managed to get a working picture of the crisis. There were approximately a dozen gunmen with AR-15s, body armor, and military training. They had cleared out every building on campus, and were now all congregated in the mathematics department, where three grad students reported that their seminar professor, Dr. Antonia Rogers, had been kept behind with another student, Scott Lang.

No demands had been made. No one could figure out what the gunmen wanted Dr. Rogers for.

SWAT and the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team were working on a plan to get eyes in the lecture hall when three SUVs full of government operatives from <REDACTED> showed up and took over the scene. They were led by Agent <REDACTED>, who told the FBI Special Agent in Charge, Agent Jimmy Woo, that the gunmen were members of <REDACTED> and wanted Dr. Rogers to open a <REDACTED> so that they could <REDACTED>, something which she would be unable to do, which would likely result in her and her grad student’s death. Working with SWAT and HRT, Agent <REDACTED> developed a plan to storm the building and recover the hostages by force.

At 13:22 hours, as SWAT was getting ready to move in, more gunshots were reported inside the mathematics building. A single gunman, unaffiliated with the hostage-takers, had entered the building via the fire escape.

Agent <REDACTED> gave a go order.

SWAT and HRT, along with tactical forces from <REDACTED> were successful in subduing all hostiles, the only casualties being two hostage-takers.

Dr. Rogers and Mr. Lang were both rescued safely, and the single gunman surrendered and was taken into custody by <REDACTED>. Mr. Lang appeared uninjured but was sent to Cedar Sinai Hospital for evaluation, and Dr. Rogers was released into the care of Agent <REDACTED>.

***

Really, it was a lot more dramatic than that.

She remembers the shock of seeing Bucky at the end of the hallway, her guard’s gun jammed under her chin, leaving a tiny circular bruise that would take weeks to fully go away. The stone-cold focus in his eyes like nothing she had ever seen, his voice flat and even saying, _Don’t move, Toni_.

The bark of his gun, hitting the gunman right between the eyes, a perfect shot that dropped him before Toni could even flinch.

Bucky starting to run towards her, and a voice at the other end of the hall shouting, “Get the hell away from my wife!”

“ _Steve,”_ she’d said, feeling a million things at once, moving between his gun and Bucky because he was facing the wrong way to see his face, he hadn’t looked yet, he was probably blinded by fear and anger.

And Steve looking past her, seeing Bucky, going white as a sheet. Lowering his gun, hands shaking, saying, “Buck?”

Guns going down, except then there were more hostiles coming around the corner, shouting, and Steve had been closest—he’d grabbed her and pulled her around the corner, tucked her into the shield of his body, had the gall while people were _shooting at them_ to look at her hand and say, surprised, “You’re still wearing your ring?”

“No!” she’d shouted, even though she was, she definitely was, and it was right there on her finger. “Go shoot those guys, Steve, Jesus Christ!”

And he did. Or rather, he and Bucky did, moving in perfect concert even though this wasn’t Steve’s Bucky and it wasn’t this Bucky’s Steve, and later maybe Toni would wonder about fate and interdimensional constants and that sort of thing, but in the moment she was curled up under a water fountain with her head in her arms praying that if she got hit with a stray bullet it was somewhere like her arm or her leg and not anywhere near the baby.

In the end, when it was quiet for a few minutes, she got brave enough to peer around the corner. Steve and Bucky were the only ones left standing, guns in their hands, breathing hard, just staring at each other.

Finally, Bucky croaked, “ _Stevie_ ,” and Steve made a noise like he’d been shot.

“How?” he started to ask. “How are you…”

But then the rest of the SWAT team arrived, along with some guys in FBI windbreakers and a few faces Toni recognized from her wedding.

A lot of things happened very fast, and the next thing she knew she was in the back of a black ambulance—why the hell was it black? was it a spy ambulance? she didn’t even know spies _had_ ambulances—trying to insist to a medic with the disposition of a golem that she be allowed to bring the Thingamajig 3000 with her, because it was proprietary and very fragile, and also that she be allowed to leave right now, actually _right now_ , because her husband and dead best friend were probably beating each other up in the parking lot like eight-year-olds having a playground spat, except they both had super spy training and guns.

“Your husband’s file says you have a history of complications with pregnancy,” the golem told her. “So you’re not going anywhere until I check on the baby.”

Steve, standing in the open ambulance door, said, “Baby?”

***

En route to SHIELD’s super secret base in the Nevada desert, Steve sits in the back of the ambulance with Toni, not touching her and not saying anything.

Curled up under an orange shock blanket, listening to the beep of two heartbeats on the monitor and watching the flat desert landscape roll past like so much water, Toni recalls what she’d thought when they had their first fight: that she would rather endure a million painful, awkward silences with Steve than years of idyllic happiness with anyone else.

She feels the same now, after all of it. She doesn’t hide the fact that she’s looking at him, re-learning the beloved lines of his dark eyebrows, his fine nose, and he doesn’t hide the fact that he’s looking back at her.

“I did the therapy back in college,” Toni says, apropos of nothing.

Steve looks confused for a second, until she continues, “It doesn’t make me dirty, or ruined, or less capable of deciding what I want,” at which point he seems to catch on and looks suddenly horrified.

“I never thought it did,” he swears, earnest, shifting forward to take her hands. “Is that what you thought? Toni—“

“What was I supposed to think?” she snaps, even as wave after wave of relief is rolling over her—that she was right about him, at least this much, that she didn’t marry a man who blamed her for being assaulted. “I told you, and it was like everything changed. You pulled away from me, you wouldn’t touch me.”

“Oh, baby,” Steve says, tucking her hair behind her ear, thumb lingering in her hairline, just above her ear, where he used to press his mouth and hum. “It wasn’t like that. I promise it wasn’t like that.”

“Then what?” Toni asks, but before Steve can answer, the ambulace stops and the doors open.

Toni’s carted off to the medical wing, Steve walking next to her gurney, still holding her hand. When she sees Bucky being marched in a different direction with his hands in cuffs, she makes a fuss, but Steve quiets her with a look that says he’s just as angry about it as she is, but now’s not the time, and says, “He’ll be alright, Tones, they won’t hurt him.”

He goes with her into the exam room, where the golem and a nurse with a round, happy face look Toni over and pronounce her slightly dehydrated and totally annoying. They leave her with a little plastic cup of apple juice and an IV drip, at which point Steve gets up on a chair, points the security camera in the corner at the wall, and rips out a wire that she figures is the microphone.

“So,” she says, swirling her apple juice, “this is SHIELD, huh?”

Steve almost falls off the chair.

“Oh yeah, sorry,” Toni says. “I’ve known you were a spy since, like, the second date. I left myself a back door when I did that codework for the Pentagon.”

Steve sits down and puts his head in his hands. “Of course you did. Why wouldn’t you?”

“So does Sharon work here too, or did you meet her on one of your ‘work trips’?” She does the air quotes and everything, mostly because she wants to scratch Sharon’s eyes out but she can’t because they’ve never met.

“What?” Steve raises his head. “Sharon? Who said anything about Sharon?”

Toni shrugs, sips her apple juice. “I don’t know. I just figured, since we were airing our dirty laundry earlier…”

“What does my handler have to do with our marriage?”

“Fine, Steve.” Toni’s too tired to feel angry anymore, but her hormones sure are making a valiant effort, because if after _all this_ he still can’t come clean to her, then she doesn’t even want to try. “Pretend you weren’t cheating on me, fine. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, anyways—“

“ _Cheating on you?”_ Steve sounds so incredulous that Toni almost believes him, because he’s always been an awful liar. “Toni, you’re my _wife,_ I would never—I’ve never even wanted anyone else.”

“Never?”

Steve’s mouth works, but no sound comes out.

“Sorry,” Toni rubs her hand over her face. “Sorry, that wasn’t…Bucky’s different. For me, too.”

Steve stares at her, slack-jawed. “For you, too?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says, quiet. “For me, too.”

He gets up from the chair in the corner and comes to sit on the edge of her bed. His hand stutters as he reaches for her, but she catches it, folds it her own. Even if he’s about to admit to her that she was right about Sharon, that he’s with someone new now and that he’ll be there for the baby even if there’s no resurrecting their marriage, she’s not about to deny him something as simple and uncomplicated as this: the comfort of holding her hand while he talks about someone he loved, and lost.

“You’re right about Bucky,” Steve starts, in that tone he used to give her speeches about truth, justice, and the American way, serious, steady with conviction. “You’re right. But there was never anything between me and Sharon. She’s my handler.”

“Your handler calls you in the middle of the night?”

“Yeah. She does, sometimes. And I pick up. Because it’s my job, and my responsibility, and sometimes there are lives on the line. But those months, the last few months before, there was—Look, this is going to sound crazy, but we were dealing with something sort of unprecedented, and it was, well, kind of personal for me—”

Toni remembers, abruptly, with the hazy quality of a dream: Steve running his fingers through her hair, crystalline tears, _He died again._ “Bucky came back, didn’t he?”

Steve laughs, and it sounds a little watery. “Why am I even surprised anymore? Of course you knew.”

“I didn’t,” Toni swears, as their whole sorry history rearranges itself in her mind—Steve’s distance, his silence, his drawing away from the things that comfort him, shutting himself off, exactly how he’s always dealt with pain. “Not then. But me and this Bucky have been talking a lot about his dimension, and there seem to be some similarities.”

“You and him,” Steve says. It’s not a question, but it is.

“Not yet,” Toni answers honestly. “Maybe, though. If he—If you—“

“What?"

“I mean, if you wanted. Because I do."

“All three of us?” Steve clarifies, sounding so hopeful it hurts.

“Yeah,” Toni says. “All three of us."

“Yes,” Steve says, like it’s been pulled out of him. “God, yes, yes.” He takes her face between his hands and kisses her forehead, tears on his lips, kisses that spot at the corner of her ear. “Thank you.”

She reaches out and grabs onto the front of his shirt, needing suddenly to feel the solidness of him. “So I guess, if he cooperates, baby makes four.”

Steve breaks out in a startled laugh, like he forgot what it was like to feel like this, and maybe Toni did, too. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, baby makes four.”

And if her hands start shaking at that, at the mention of her pregnancy, if Steve scoots closer on the bed and pulls her into his arms and kisses her hair and tells her that it’s gonna be okay, that it will all be okay—well, the camera’s pointed at the wall, the sound’s turned off. No one but them will ever know.

***

Bucky being here, as it turns out, is all SHIELD’s fault. They have a working model of Toni’s Thingamajig 3000—or a sort-of-working model, which they turned on only long enough for it to explode and apparently not do anything. Except it _did_ do something, it just did it 4,000 miles away, in London, where Bucky woke up laying in a puddle in entirely the wrong dimension and walked around aimlessly until he saw a sign for a lecture by Dr. Antonia Rogers and figured that name was too lucky to be a coincidence.

The man in charge of this base, a scary guy in an eyepatch called Nick Fury, has Bucky in solitary confinement ‘until they send him back’ because the last time they happened upon a wild James Buchannan Barnes he was super emo and tried to kill them all. His head scientist, a kid named Dr. Fitz who looks like he's constantly so nervous he’s about to piss himself, comes to Toni in the medical wing to ask for her help fixing their machine, since hers is a bit different from theirs and it looks like they might be complementary models—Toni exchanges a significant look with her husband, then agrees, with the caveat that someone with an impressive title write her a doctor’s note so she doesn’t get kicked out of school. It’s all a ruse—SHIELD, Steve told her, is dead set on sending Bucky back to his own dimension, come hell or high water. But if Toni can get a handle on how SHIELD’s machine works, then she might be able to disable it permanently, or at least learn enough from Fitz that she can build her own later. If they can’t send him back, Steve says—speaking from experience—their next move will be to let Steve try to ‘get through to him.’ Not that this particular Bucky needs ‘getting through to,’ but it will at least get him out of solitary.

Of course, this all depends on what Bucky wants. Which is why, on the third day, when Fitz is saying, “I just cannae figure out how they got around the McKay-Zelenka Law,” she cuts in with, “You know, I think Bucky was saying something about that, actually. Maybe I should go ask him.”

They make her sign about a half-dozen waivers, and make Steve sign some too, which is sort of backwards and insulting, and she insists to a lot of very skeptical physicists that Bucky does in fact know what the McKay-Zelenka law is, and that in his own universe he was intimately involved in the development of a dimensional portal-ripping device, and after a few very hectic hours, she finds herself in front of the door to Bucky’s cell.

It buzzes open. She pushes inside.

When he sees her, he’s off his feet in an instant. “Toni. Are you okay? The baby’s okay?”

“I’m fine,” she assures him, “everything’s fine, Steve made them check me over like a million times.”

“Can I…?” he asks, hands hovering over her.

Instead of answering, she pulls him into a tight hug. He hugs her back, careful of his metal arm squeezing too hard, flesh hand cradling the back of her head. “I was so worried,” he says. “When Pepper called…”

“I’m okay.” Toni runs her hand over the back of his head, his close-shorn hair, his neck. “We’re all okay. Me, Steve, the baby…”

Bucky exhales in her arms, like he’s been carrying the inhale around for three days. Probably he has.

The one thing Nick Fury absolutely would not budge on was the cameras—they’re going to have video and audio of this meeting, no matter what. So Toni stays in the hug, tilting her mouth close to Bucky’s ear, and says, “Listen. They want to send you back. But I can make sure they can’t.”

He goes to pull away, shocked, but she holds onto him. “What are you saying?” he asks.

“You know what I’m saying.” Toni turns her face into his neck, kisses his skin, pulls his hand tighter around her waist. “I just need to know what you want.”

Bucky makes a choked, broken sound. “What does Steve want?”

“You. Both of us.”

He squeezes her tighter, shaking his head. “He doesn’t even know me. I’m not him, I’m not his Bucky.”

“No,” Toni agrees, squeezing back. “But you are _Bucky_. There’s no version of you anywhere, in any universe, that Steve doesn’t love. I can promise you that.”

He’s shaking, face wet against her shoulder, and she digs her fingers into his shoulder, holds the back of his head tighter, half comfort, half desperation. She doesn’t want him to leave. She doesn’t know if her and Steve work without him, and she doesn’t want him to be alone—can’t stand the thought of him being alone. “Buck,” she whispers, and twists down so she can kiss his dear, dear mouth. “Bucky…”

He makes a noise like a dying man and surges against her. She catches him, arms around his neck, and holds on while he kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her, and she doesn’t know in that moment if he’s kissing her or Anthony or if it doesn’t matter, if they’re one in the same to him, like she knows he is to Steve.

“Okay,” he says, when they break for air. “Okay.”

Toni smiles in the private space between their faces. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, and kisses her again.

When they manage to get themselves under control, Toni leads them in a very convincing theatrical rendition of ‘here’s how to bypass the McKay-Zelenka Law’ by sitting with her back to the camera and rolling up her sleeve so Bucky can read some scientific-sounding bullshit off her arm. It’s not real, it won’t work, but it sounds good and it’ll send Fitz on a wild goose chase that should last long enough for Toni to sabotage the machine.

Steve’s waiting for her when the guards escort her out of the detention center, leaning against a wall with his enormous muscly arms crossed, aiming for casual and missing by a country mile. “We good?” he asks.

“Let’s just say this.” She steps up into his personal space, dropping her voice so only they can hear. “It’s a good thing we have a really big house.”

Steve laughs, exhales, and kisses her.


End file.
